The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

Virtually all human societies were once organized tribally, yet over time most developed new political institutions which included a central state that could keep the peace and uniform laws that applied to all citizens. Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their constituents. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or are unable to perform in many of today’s developing countries—with often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.

Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power

In 1991, the United States was the only global superpower. It seemed that the 21st century, like the 20th, would belong to America. Then came the stock market bubble, the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, and the financial catastrophe of 2008. Meanwhile, China was rising and the Middle East was awakening politically. Today it is clear that America is vulnerable - to domestic and international decline and unregulated greed.

Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective

In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Thomas Sowell, one of the foremost conservative public intellectuals in the country, argues that political and ideological struggles have led to dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. Pundits and politically motivated economists trumpet ambiguous statistics and sensational theories while ignoring the true determinant of income inequality: the production of wealth.

The Untold History of the United States

Aided by the latest archival findings and recently declassified documents and building on the research of the world’s best scholars, Stone and Kuznick construct an often shocking but meticulously documented "people’s history" of the American empire that challenges the notion of American exceptionalism. Stone and Kuznick will introduce listeners to a pantheon of heroes and villains as they show not only how far the United States has drifted from its democratic traditions but the powerful forces that have struggled to get us back on track.

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of "Christian America" is nothing more than a myth - and a relatively recent one at that.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories.

Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

Author and historian Tom Holland returns to his roots in Roman history and the audience he cultivated with Rubicon - his masterful, witty, brilliantly researched popular history of the fall of the Roman republic - with Dynasty, a luridly fascinating history of the reign of the first five Roman emperors.

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

This is the story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country. The Path to Power reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and ambition that set LBJ apart. It follows him from the Hill Country to New Deal Washington, from his boyhood through the years of the Depression to his debut as Congressman, his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, at age 31, of the national power for which he hungered.

Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it. The great dilemma of our shrinking world is simple: never before have those we disagree with been so present in our lives. The more globalization dissolves national borders, the more clearly we see that human beings are deeply divided on moral lines - about everything from tax codes to sexual practices to energy consumption - and that, when we really disagree, our emotions turn positively tribal.

The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

While the world has made encouraging strides in the fight against global poverty, there is a hidden crisis silently undermining our best efforts to help the poor. It is a plague of everyday violence. Beneath the surface of the world’s poorest communities, common violence—like rape, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, police abuse and other brutality—has become routine and relentless. And like a horde of locusts devouring everything in their path, the unchecked plague of violence ruins lives, blocks the road out of poverty, and undercuts development.

The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath

In 2006, Ben S. Bernanke was appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, capping a meteoric trajectory from a rural South Carolina childhood to professorships at Stanford and Princeton, to public service in Washington's halls of power. There would be no time to celebrate, however - the burst of the housing bubble in 2007 set off a domino effect that would bring the global financial system to the brink of meltdown.

The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945

This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, "a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened - muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox."

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

From a master chronicler of legal and financial misconduct, a magnificent investigation nine years in the making, this book traces the political intrigue and inner workings of the Catholic Church. Decidedly not about faith, belief in God, or religious doctrine, this audiobook is about the church's accumulation of wealth and its byzantine entanglements with financial markets across the world.

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance

A gripping history of banking and the booms and busts that shaped the world on both sides of the Atlantic, The House of Morgan traces the trajectory of the J. P.Morgan empire from its obscure beginnings in Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Ron Chernow paints a fascinating portrait of the private saga of the Morgans and the rarefied world of the American and British elite in which they moved. Based on extensive interviews and access to the family and business archives, The House of Morgan is an investigative masterpiece.

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia

Andrei Lankov has gone where few outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding. In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state.

Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

The ascension of Vladimir Putin - a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB - to the presidency of Russia in 1999 should have been a signal that the country was headed away from democracy. Yet in the intervening years - as America and the world's other leading powers have continued to appease him - Putin has grown into not only a dictator but a global threat. With his vast resources and nuclear weapons, Putin is at the center of a worldwide assault on political liberty.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth - and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

The European catastrophe, the long continuous period from 1914 to1949, was unprecedented in human history - an extraordinarily dramatic, often traumatic, and endlessly fascinating period of upheaval and transformation.

The Great Divide: The Conflict Between Washington and Jefferson That Defined a Nation

History tends to cast the early years of America in a glow of camaraderie when there were, in fact, many conflicts between the Founding Fathers - none more important than the one between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Their disagreement centered on the highest, most original public office created by the Constitutional Convention: the presidency. It also involved the nation's foreign policy, the role of merchants and farmers in a republic, and the durability of the union.

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

In SPQR, world-renowned classicist Mary Beard narrates the unprecedented rise of a civilization that even 2,000 years later still shapes many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy’s Only Hope

Did Wall Street cause the mess we are in? Should Washington place stronger regulations on the financial industry? Can we lower unemployment rates by controlling the free market? Answer: no. Not only is free-market capitalism good for the economy, it is our only hope for recovery. As the nation’s longest-serving CEO of one of the top 25 financial institutions, John Allison has had a unique inside view of the events leading up to the financial crisis.

Winston Churchill is perhaps the most important political figure of the 20th century. His great oratory and leadership during the Second World War were only part of his huge breadth of experience and achievement. Studying his life is a fascinating way to imbibe the history of his era and gain insight into key events that have shaped our time.

The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

John Foster Dulles was secretary of state while his brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In this book, Stephen Kinzer places their extraordinary lives against the backdrop ofAmerican culture and history. He uses the framework of biography to ask: Why does the United States behave as it does in the world?

Audible Editor Reviews

Editors Select, September 2014 - I acquired Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order for Audible and asked for Jonathan Davis to be cast as the narrator, and it was a great combination. So, I’m biased, but Political Order and Political Decay has been my most-awaited nonfiction book for a while. It picks up where the previous book left off (at the Industrial Revolution), and unspools the history of politics until the present day. Francis Fukuyama, as narrated by Jonathan Davis, gives readers a very smart, very modern way of looking at the entire arc of world events, and tries to answer the ambitious question: 'Why does humanity even need politics?!' Christina, Audible Editor

Publisher's Summary

The second volume of the best-selling landmark work on the history of the modern state. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, David Gress called Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order "magisterial in its learning and admirably immodest in its ambition." In the New York Times Book Review, Michael Lind described the book as "a major achievement by one of the leading public intellectuals of our time." And in the Washington Post, Gerard DeGrott exclaimed "this is a book that will be remembered. Bring on volume two." Volume two is finally here, completing the most important work of political thought in at least a generation. Taking up the essential question of how societies develop strong, impersonal, and accountable political institutions, Fukuyama follows the story from the French Revolution to the so-called Arab Spring and the deep dysfunctions of contemporary American politics. He examines the effects of corruption on governance, and why some societies have been successful at rooting it out. He explores the different legacies of colonialism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and offers a clear-eyed account of why some regions have thrived and developed more quickly than others. And he boldly reckons with the future of democracy in the face of a rising global middle class and entrenched political paralysis in the West. A sweeping, masterful account of the struggle to create a well-functioning modern state, Political Order and Political Decay is destined to be a classic.

There is a certain beauty to this book. The author completely convinces the listener that there is no more important field of study to understand the world and how we got where we are then Political Science. The author is that good at laying the foundations for his points. Moreover, the author is telling an incredible complicated story with many different moving parts but he excels at telling you what he's going to tell you, tells you, and then tells you what he just told you, and then just in case you didn't understand his points he'll explain them once again by comparing and contrasting with some diametrically opposed counter examples.

This volume can be read independently from the first volume. The listener should just pick the area he is most interested in. This volume looks at the more direct relationships to how our current political entities evolved to their current configurations.

He explained China to me in such a way that I have to reconsider how I perceive them. For the last 30 years, their form of authoritarian rule might have been much better than a democracy since they have such a small middle class relative to the other classes. The concerns expressed at Tiananmen Square have fallen on the wayside in today's China. Overall, he gave a fascinating discussion concerning China.

I know that Political Science isn't the most important way to understand who we are, but it definitely helps in our understanding by thinking about our institutions, rule of law, and state structures. The one thing that the author did that really irritated me was in parts of the book he would make the false equivalence claim such as "both the Tea Party and progressive Democrats are to blame for ...", any sentence that starts that way is flawed. He argues there is a mushy middle between the two extreme positions and neither one is correct. I'll let the listener decide for himself, as for me I disagree. He also made a statement that our current congress wanted to shut down the government rather than pay for past debts owed by the federal government and putting us into a fiscal catastrophe. I just don't see it that way. It was only one political party that wanted to renege on past government debt.

Overall, the book is very likeable, makes one appreciate the role for Political Scientist and gives one valid way for describing how we got where we are today.

As an European, I have to confess I did have some prejudice against a mainstream American political scientist, half-expecting that the book will be 672 pages of praise of the American system. I was put to shame. This was a somber and analytical analysis of different systems, which actually did not conclude that liberal democracy is the only possible way ahead for the rest of the world.

It's hard to review a second volume of a two-volume work without comparing it to the first, and that comparison ends unfavorably for this one. While the first one was organized beautifully, geographically and historically, starting with China, and then moving through India, the Arab world, Turkey, Byzantium ending up in Western Europe, the volume two seemed more disorganized, fragmented, but then, so is the modern world. The book did have some central points, and these were repeated more times than I care for. But the repetition did serve its purpose: Although I can't give you a nice quick overview of the organization of this volume, I can certainly tell you, without much hesitation, all that you want to know about difference between clientelism and patronage, or the importance of building state institutions before democratization.

It's absolutely a book worth the time and effort, and the only reason or gets four stars from me is that I enjoyed the first volume more.

The book basic theme is to review and discuss the underlying rules by which societies organize themselves. The book covers from approximately 1806 to date. During this time political institutions, the modern state, rule of law and accountable government developed to a dominant model.

Fukayama divides the book into four sections. 1) The establishment of the modern states 2) Its expansion to other regions of the world 3) the concurrent spread of democracy 4) the degeneration of formerly successful democratic institutions. The author primarily has synthesized the existing literature on the topic and presents it in a readable organized manner even if it is a somewhat academic style. The author is primarily concerned about the functionality of government.

In school I remember studying Aristotle. I remember learning one of his major insights was “the purpose of politics is in not to make living together possible, but to make living well possible.” Whereas Fukuyama suggests that politics has the more limited role of simply enabling innately disputatious humans to live together at all.

I understand Fukayama has written another book entitled “The Origins of Political Order” 2011 and this current book is a continuation of the first book. The first book is over 600 pages so I am not sure I will tackle that book and just allow this second book to satisfy my curiosity about the subject. This book is also a long book just over 24 hours of listening in the audio book format. This book is packed with so much information I will have to read it a number of times to fully process and understand it. Jonathan Davis did a good job narrating the book.

Francis Fukuyama offers a benediction and warning about democracy in “Political Order and Political Decay”. His book is difficult to absorb because of its wide territorial coverage and a listener’s sense that political theory is being justified as much as proven. However, Fukuyama impressively argues that democracy is the best form of government in the world and may evolve into a form of government that is best for all modern societies. He examines the current state of American democracy and other forms of democracy developed, or developing, in other countries.

Fukuyama explains there are three pillars of democracy. First, a state must be formed to protect its citizens and its territory. Second, rule-of-law must be established to constrain power held by the few over the many. And three, accountability must be institutionalized for policies that serve the interest of all the people; not only factions or special interests. When any of these supports are weakened, democracy decays.

If Fukuyama’s theory is correct, it offers a road map to America for its leadership role in the world. The road map starts with America righting its own ship of state by being a good example of democracy. America should support outside countries’ efforts to become independent democracies. Fukuyama suggests every developing sovereign country should be treated with respect based on their road to nationhood. Governments will form based on acquiring their own state identity. America’s role is to support nations trying to establish rule-of-law’ policies that serve interests of their citizens. Finally, America’s role is to demonstrate, encourage, and supplement other nations’ efforts to create institutional organizations that promote the pillars of democracy; with the United States, not as a parent, but as a partner.

There are chapters yet to go but this work has already earned five stars and I needed to say so right away!

This is the best historical analysis of any kind I have ever seen. Not that I agree with all of it. And from time to time there is a bit to much over thinking. However, this work provided many missing pieces to my understanding of long wave 'evolutionary' civilization. The author is especially helpful in contrasting colonialism in North America, South America and Africa. One sad conclussion I make is that the end products of various colonial enterprises were simply unavoidable. For instance, European diseases wiped out most of new world peoples the same way bubonic plague wiped out much of Europe time and again. Nothing could have been done about any of it.

Similarly, North and South America evolved as they did because South America was entirely founded by a plundering "Conqistador" civilization while North America was founded by hapless, largely clueless family groups; there were more women and children on the Mayflower then adult men and half the entire compliment died the first Winter. These people would not have taken down Montezuma.

The author's discussion of African colonialism was the most useful of all because I have studied it less. It's now clear to me the post colonial African detritus was as inevitable as small pox was in the new world. There is no purpose in self flagilation on this matter any more then to weap and wail over small pox 500 years after the fact.

In the second volume of his work in political theory Francis Fukuyama contemplates the development of democracy and it's main characteristics (modern state, rule of law and accountability). Reflecting on the experiences of different countries and regions, the Author discuss the possibilities of democracy and the perils and challenges it faces. Liberal democracy, argues Fukuyama, isn't a natural development in politics. It must be constructed with institutions and desired by the people. Most important, it must answers the demands and fulfills the aspirations of the society. The ideal solution, Fukuyama points, is an efficient liberal democracy. In that regard, there is no simple solution. One must experiences distinct institutions and relates to diverse historical background. In the meantime, one has to believe in the advantages of democracy, because authoritarianism and dictatorship are along the way. Easy said than done!

Fukuyama focuses on three variables - rule of law, state and accountability - to explain the process of political order and political decay. While this was not his aim at the outset of this volume, his ideas and research form a great counterweight to extreme political ideologies and reasoning devoid of nuance. The evidence to support his framework are both interesting and enlightening.

This book is written in a far more attractive style than the first volume of Political Order and Political Decay. While the author sometimes still discerns in too much detail, he avoids the long, dull and factoid laden descriptions of the first part. Another critique is the use of quite different idioms to refer to the same concept (e.g. the use of democracy to refer to accountability).

In general I would recommend this as a thoroughly interesting book. Skip the first volume, part two contains a summary.